By Professor George H. Perkins, Ph.D.
State Geologist of Vermont
It is undoubted that the Champlain valley at the time when the first Europeans entered the region was occupied by two great Indian peoples, the Confederacy of the Six Nations and the Algonkins or Abnaki. To the Six Nations the name Iroquois was generally given by the French explorers. They held full sway over the New York side of the Champlain valley, but the occupancy of the eastern, or Vermont, side is less certain. There can be no question that this side of the valley was possessed by the Algonkins for the greater part of the time, but there are several centuries when it is not easy to determine certainly the precise relations of these two peoples. Most of what became New England and the Atlantic border and a vast territory in Canada was always, so far as can be now discovered, occupied by the Algonkins who also reached far westward and southward through the Mississippi valley. The Iroquois occupied a comparatively small area about lakes Erie and Ontario and eastward along the St. Lawrence, including the whole of what is now New York, as well as parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and a long, narrow strip of Canada north of New York.
They also occupied territory in the south, west of the Carolinas. How long or how completely the Iroquois possessed the Vermont side of the Champlain valley we may never know, but it appears to be pretty certain that they did for a time, and probably several times, dispossess the usual owners and hold as their own the entire shore of Champlain. It appears from various records that sometime about 1540 the Iroquois were in control of both sides of the lake and of the Vermont as well as the New York shores. It also appears that these people held the region for a century when they withdrew. Why they retired to the western side is not plain. Considering their warlike disposition and reputation and the very great fear in which they were held by the Algonkins it is impossible to believe that these latter drove them back across the lake, and yet why they should have voluntarily left their eastern possessions one cannot readily explain.
In 1640 Father Ducreux made a map of the region and on this map Lake Champlain is made the western boundary of the Algonkin territory, so that by this time the ownership had again changed.
In 1690, as is well known, the Algonkins and French destroyed Schenectady and, though their force was very small, they appear to have passed without any difficulty through the Champlain valley, and had it been occupied by Mohawks or any Iroquois tribe this could not have been possible.
At different times for many years various Vermont legislatures were beset by claims which the Caughnawaga Indians persistently entered. These claims were for remuneration for land taken by the white men from their ancestors and which they declared were formerly the property of their tribe.
The territory which the Caughnawagas claimed was finally defined by them as bounded by Lake Champlain on the west and on the east by the mountain ranges which divide the waters running into Lake Champlain from the Missisquoi, Lamoille and Winooski rivers from those which run into the Connecticut, together with so much of the land drained by Otter creek as would be embraced by a line drawn from Ticonderoga to the sources of the Winooski.
So far as can be ascertained by examination of documents, the validity or invalidity of this claim was neither denied nor allowed, but the claim was never in any way granted. As intimated, it was repeatedly advanced at different sessions of the General Assembly until finally abandoned in 1874. From the persistency with which the Indians brought forward their claim it seems probable that whether it had any substantial basis or not, they really believed that it had.
In a very full and interesting discussion of this question, Mr. D. P. Thompson in an Appendix to the History of Montpelier, Vt., writes as follows: “In the published journal of the expedition of Champlain when in the summer of 1609 he discovered the lake that bears his name we have full and direct evidence that the Iroquois were in possession of just about the same tract of territory in Vermont as that to which their descendants have latterly been laying claim as a part of their original domain.”